Lee’s Radical Reading Room - Letters of the Law by Sora Y. Han
- Project SaySomething
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
This week’s recommendation: Letters of the Law by Sora Y. Han
How do laws remember? And what do they choose to forget?
This week in Lee’s Radical Reading Room, we’re starting with a text that refuses to let the American legal system off the hook for its historical amnesia. Letters of the Law by Sora Y. Han is a bold and necessary critique of the idea that the law can be neutral, colorblind, or objective. Spoiler: it never has been.
As Lee puts it:
“Han shows that colorblindness isn’t just a legal framework, it’s a fantasy. One that pretends race doesn’t matter, while the entire structure of law was built around managing and justifying racial violence.”
Han dissects and critiques legal doctrine through deep analysis of iconic Supreme Court cases. Ranging from Japanese internment to affirmative action, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom, Han shows us how the ghost of slavery still animates the law’s most sacred ideals: due process, liberty, punishment, and citizenship.
This is beyond one bad ruling or a single flawed judge. It’s about how the very imagination of the law has been shaped by a desire to erase race while continuing to benefit from racial hierarchies.
Why this book matters now:
We’re still living in a time when courts invoke “colorblindness” to roll back civil rights gains and strike down policies meant to address racial harm. Han gives us language, history, and analysis to understand why that tactic is so dangerous, and why abolitionist thinking must extend beyond prisons and into the courtroom.
Key themes to sit with while you’re reading or maybe to research in addition to the book:
The legal myth of neutrality
Civil rights as sites of struggle, not settled victories
Black freedom as an unfinished and ongoing practice
The role of law in reifying, rather than resolving, racial inequality
Han asks us to rethink what law is, who it serves, and what it could become if we center the Black radical tradition instead of pretending race has nothing to do with it.
If you’re someone who wants to understand how systemic racism hides in plain sight, and how freedom movements have always pushed back against that, Letters of the Law belongs in your personal archive. Download a copy of it for free here.
Up next week: We dive into New Bones: Abolition by Joy James, a meditation on love, maroonage, and the political force of Black mothers and war resisters.
Until then: read deeply, think critically, and remember, what you learn can’t be taken from you.